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Type and the impermanence of new things

It has long been my conviction that editorial design should be contextual (that is, that the design, like the article, should be ABOUT something, and that they should seek to be about the same something) and not purely decorative, as is the current messy fashion. Purely decorative design is tedious and self-indulgent, a willfully know-nothing approach to displaying text completely in step with our times. The triumph of designers who don't read over text which, increasingly, is so brief and glib as to be worth not reading. (David Carson's designs were ABOUT something, even if you couldn't read the words. I'll give the devil that much due.)

That doesn't mean that I expect most readers to decipher the typographic codes behind designs in ND (though I'm not good enough for them to be all that subtle), but it does mean that I believe those meanings are conveyed subtextually and that they enhance — however marginally — the message of each article.

Sometimes they're an intentional commentary on and counterpoint to the text. Every once in a great while, for example, I will set a feature in Bookman as a waggish homage to the artist's origins in the 1970s, when Bookman was a dominant text face. (I have foregone the temptation to tweak artists who came to prominence in the early 1980s with Souvenir, Eras, Goudy Oldstyle, or Korinna, but someday...)

But mostly I select text and headline faces for our features based on intuitive feel and some kind of connection to the text. And all the typefaces I use in ND (save one) were first drawn at least half a century ago. We write about rooted music, and I choose from among familiar families of type whose origins and display will suggest and link to those roots. The exception is one sans serif family, a knock-off of vintage boxing posters. Which isn't much of an exception.

What I mean to say, oddly though it will read (but you've already come this far) is that different typefaces MEAN different things to me, and I therefore presume they have some of that resonance, however distantly, to our readers.

But I have recently been playing with a project which might oblige me to approach typography quite differently, for it is intentionally unrooted in the past, very aware of the present, looking forward with as much anticipation as I tend to look backwards. I am an indifferent historian of type (only recently have I discovered that Franklin Gothic is half a century older than Univers; I'd have guessed quite the opposite), and am largely habituated to the typefaces with which I became acquainted in the halcyon days of Compugraphic. But this new dabbling has proved an unexpected challenge, almost like learning a new language in middle age.

As with many things, software has made the design of new typefaces considerably easier, at least judging by their proliferation. But in trying to pick a text face from among the myriad contemporary choices, I am, for the moment, at a loss. What do they MEAN? What do they SIGNIFY? What resonance do they carry? Have I been paying so little attention as to be ignorant of these innovations?

Type didn't use to be introduced to the market with so little context. I was never a big fan of Herbert Lubalin's type, but he (and others) used the old U&LC to showcase their new designs and established a kind of context for their future use. Most of those fonts have faded from fashion (when was the last time you chose Zapf Medium or Benguiat Gothic?). Emigre mostly existed at the edge of my knowing, and their fonts always seemed experimental for the sake of being experimental, limited in context and application to the specific use for which they were originally constructed. And of no use, to me.

But we are now flooded with fresh text faces (not to mention decorative types) and I find myself at a loss picking among them. They are all technically pretty and functional, at least the ones with which I have been dabbling, but they also seem passionless and inert, and they don't swing. Most of them won't last, inevitably; that's the marketplace talking, not your friendly curmudgeon typing. And because there are so bloody many of them, I suspect none will be so generally adopted as to define a moment in time in the way that, say, Avant Garde so clearly echoes the 1960s and 1970s.

I can look at my daughter's books and guess, based on the text face, when the older ones were designed, and come up right most of the time. I wonder if these new families of type will wear that well, or if they're built in the same way the half-million dollar mansions dotting the edge of our towns and cities are built, with prefab pressboard, cheap pine, and plastic. Only the granite countertops seem built to endure. It all seems terribly wasteful. Or, to quote once again from the great fraud, Carlos Casteneda, it seems a path without heart.

Posted by grant on September 3, 2006 9:05 AM | Permalink